Readers Respond: U.S. Needs IT Makeover

Readers respond to the eWEEK editorial, "U.S. Needs IT Makeover."

In the July 10 editorial [Our View, "U.S. Needs IT Makeover,"] Stan Gibson states, "the number of foreign students on U.S. campuses is down, and the H-1B program continues to be a revolving door that lets foreigners work here for a few years before being sent home" [Our View]. But foreign graduate enrollment is up in 2005 and is trending upward for 2006. The absolute numbers are down since 2003, but the economy has something to do with choices. You cant blame it all on public policy.

A flaw in Gibsons argument about H-1Bs is that he assumes that employers of H-1B holders want to sponsor their employees for green cards. The reality is many leading IT companies are only interested in the revolving door, [bringing H-1B holders] in for cheap labor.

Ron Hira
Author of "Outsourcing America"
Assistant Professor of Public Policy
Rochester Institute of Technology
Rochester, N.Y.

Stan Gibson is dead-on with regard to Silicon Valley now being strangled [Our View, "U.S. Needs IT Makeover," July 10].

Further reading

I used to work for VeriSign (headquartered in Silicon Valley), but from Atlanta. My cost of living was about one-third that of those in the Valley. I later co-founded CipherTrust in Atlanta, which just sold for $273 million, an example of a success story for a high-tech company based in one of your new tech cities.

Most recently (2002), I tried to launch a venture to create IPv6 products. I found no expertise and no interest, and it was too expensive even in Atlanta.

I started InfoWeapons in the Philippines at about one-eighth the cost of launching CipherTrust in Atlanta. I have 80 great people there now in a 13,000-square-foot facility, with a state-of-the-art dual-stack network. We have created our first product—a dual-stack, highly secure DNS server appliance—and we have many more under way.

InfoWeapons was just bought by Innofone.com, the U.S. leader in IPv6. Due in no small part to that acquisition, Innofone.com has now gotten $50 million in funding.

I could not have launched InfoWeapons in the United States. And it is still hard to sell IPv6 in the United States, while it is alive and well in Asia (especially with telcos).

Time to wake up, sleeping giant!

Lawrence E. Hughes